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1. 00:00 You ready? Go. Professor, um, people are aware of the importance of healthy narcissism. Are they really? Narcissism uh has acquired a bad rep, a bad reputation. So people confuse healthy with unhealthy. And many people say there’s no such thing as healthy
2. 00:26 narcissism. So on and so forth. Healthy narcissism is uh according to many scholars starting with Freud and much later is probably the the the most important foundational cornerstone of mental health. Ironically, healthy narcissism helps us to form a self-concept
3. 00:50 which is highly regulated and stable. Healthy narcissism regulates our sense of selfworth. Healthy narcissism is at the core of our self-esteem and self-confidence. Healthy narcissism provide us with the ability to distinguish the external world from the
4. 01:08 internal one. Healthy narcissism um redirects our sexual energy uh so that it is invested in other people object libido as it used to be called rather than narcissistic libido and so on so forth. Without healthy narcissism, uh there would be a major problem.
5. 01:30 Indeed, we have several mental illnesses where healthy narcissism is either missing or has mutated somehow into a pathological form. Narcissism, by the way, is a trait and all people have the trait of narcissism. It’s a universal trait. Everyone has the
6. 01:51 trait of narcissism and like all traits, it’s hereditary. It is genetic. This the narcissism trait is indeed genetic, hereditary. And so um the trait of narcissism is almost synonymous with the formation of identity and self. The ability to interact with with other people from a
7. 02:19 safe internalized secure base, from a safe position regarding oneself. When you have healthy narcissism, you have a stable view of who you are, where you end, and the world begins. What is happening inside your kingdom, so to speak, within your boundaries, what is
8. 02:35 happening. You’re able to regulate your sense of continuity, the the self-p perception as continuous, which is at the core of self, the construct of self. In short, there is no mental health without healthy narcissism. It’s completely impossible.
9. 02:55 It’s this is in accordance with the um World Health Organization slogan. There is no health without mental health. And this is a very important thing because what we see nowadays is an increasing of this perception of people that the mental illness people are dangerous and
10. 03:21 they have to be segregated from the uh society. And so in this sense, how can we explain to your viewers for people in general what is normal? We should not confuse normal with healthy. Normal as the name implies is a statistical measure. Yes, it’s how many people conform to a
11. 03:52 specific trait, specific behavior and so on. And normaly is culture bound. It depends on historical context, social uh environment, specific culture, expectations, moray, conventions, norms, beliefs, values. In other words, normaly is a social construct, not a
12. 04:17 psychological construct. However, healthy is a psychological construct. When we say that someone is mentally healthy today we apply two criteria. I think there should be a third one. The two criteria that are universally accepted in the profession are is the person ego synous
13. 04:38 feeling happy or content with who they are? Are they feeling good with themselves? Do they accept themselves and so on? So egoonyy is the first criterion for health, mental health and the second criteria is functionality. Is the person functional in a variety of
14. 04:56 settings at home in the family uh workplace etc etc. Today we say that if
15. 05:05 a person is egoous if the person is happy with who they are and they are functional they’re mentally healthy. I think there’s a third missing criterion which should be added and that is reality testing. Yes. Because a person can be egoous and functional and yet be completely
16. 05:24 divorced from reality. For example, they are high functioning psychotics. And these kind of psychotics are very happy with who they are especially if they are grandio psychotics. think you if you think Jesus or Napoleon makes you very happy. So they fulfill the first
17. 05:44 criterion they fulfill the second criterion because most psychosis most psychosis or psychotic disorders are intermittent. They’re not all the time. You see you have you have attacks. Yeah. So in between attacks they’re perfectly functional. They hold jobs. They have
18. 06:00 families and so on so forth. So theoretically we should say that people with psychotic disorders are okay. We don’t need intervention. We don’t need medication. on it. So why do we intervene? Because they lack reality testing. They they have a severe problem
19. 06:13 telling apart the internal universe from the external universe. This is a psychological mechanism known as hyperreflexivity. They’re un they they extend their self onto the world. They consume the world into the self. So this is a major problem. I think we should add this
20. 06:33 criteria. Anyone who is divorced from reality, even if they are happy with it, even if they love it, even if they want it and they’re fully functional, we should intervene because when you’re divorced from reality, this creates two problems. The first problem is a
21. 06:51 decrease in self-efficacy in your ability to secure favorable outcomes from the environment. And the second problem, you are very likely to harm other people. very likely for example by imposing your fantasies on other people or by acting in ways
22. 07:08 which are divorced from reality and endanger other people or damage them somehow. So this absolutely must be a mental health criterion and today it’s not which I think is a serious mistake. I think the reason it is not is political because if we were to include this in
23. 07:27 the definition of what is mentally healthy, we would pathize religious people. Simple. Yes. Because religion religion is a delusional disorder. So if we were to say that reality testing is one of the criteria for mental health, we would be forced to say ipso immediately that
24. 07:47 religious people are mentally ill because they’re divorced from reality. It’s an escape. It’s not an escape. It’s a political consideration there. They they they say they avoid this because the minute you start to say that reality testing is crucial, you come across many problems
25. 08:05 in religion, in politics, in you know it creates many social problems. So they avoid this. They avoid this criterion. Religion is very influential. There’s a lot of money there, a lot of political power, a lot of and yet it is a shared fantasy. Definitely it’s divorce from
26. 08:22 reality. But you can say the same about uh political movements like Donald Trump’s MAGA make America great again. It’s also an example of a shared fantasy which is utterly divorced from reality. So the where does it end? Are we going now to pathologize political movements,
27. 08:40 religions, societies, cultures? Nazi Germany for example was a pathological was an extreme shared fantasy totally divorced from reality. So where does it stop? Because this is a slippery slope and we are very afraid to introduce a criterion that has political and
28. 08:59 religious or faith implications. We are avoiding this question altogether. But I think it’s a copout. I think we need to be rigorous and honest and integral. We have integrity and uh introduce this criteria. There is another copout when it comes to
29. 09:18 what is healthy and what is normal. what is healthy and what is not and that is the copout that if society and culture the culture the prevailing culture tell you that it’s okay it’s okay so in all the texts of the DSM you find a disclaimer unless so this is a mental illness
30. 09:37 unless it is common in the society and culture of the individual yeah it’s a mental illness severe unless it is common in the culture and so as if cultures and societ Societies cannot be mentally ill when we know definitely that cultures and societies can and do
31. 09:57 become very often mentally ill. Like if we look at Nazi Germany that was a mentally ill society, you know, but we are afraid to go there because of political correctness and the implications and push back, resistance and even violence or aggression. If we
32. 10:14 were tomorrow to say, “Yeah, religious people are pathological.” they will destroy the profession of psychology and psychiatry. There will not be one grant. There will not be a penny there. I mean, so there’s a lot of commercial compromises, political compromises and
33. 10:28 the profession is contaminated by this. And that’s why I keep saying that one of the reasons I keep saying that psychology is a pseudocience will never be a science. Can we look at this uh in the sense of there’s a need a parameter and for a a parameter for measure the
34. 10:48 the this rate of of mental illness in a certain uh country or or culture. And um
35. 10:59 this this common sense about uh what is normal or or what is healthy. Looking for the statistical um concept because the frequency is important and so we have to count. It creates a problem with the question of frame of reference. So you could use normaly in statistics,
36. 11:32 statistical normaly, you could use it as a as a criterion or parameter. But then what is the framework? The whole globe, the country, the region that what’s the framework? So taking again the example of Nazi Germany within Nazi Germany the normal the normal was psychopathy.
37. 11:55 Psychopaths were normal. Yes. But the minute we expanded it and included Western Europe then clearly Nazi Germany was abnormal. This is precisely the problem with pathologizing collectives and societies because collective and societies are huge.
38. 12:14 millions, tens of millions of people, they have enough resources inside the society to sustain the fantasy. You know, they have economic resources, money, this that. So, they are basically self-sufficient and self-contained. They don’t need the approval of outsiders.
39. 12:34 They don’t need to measure themselves against the outside, against the external world. They can isolate themselves and they can say we define what is normal internally. We define what is healthy internally. And because we don’t depend on anyone or
40. 12:49 anything, our definition stands within our society and culture. This is what’s healthy. This is what’s normal. We have examples. North Korea, you know, these are countries totally isolated. Japan for hundreds of years. Japan was totally isolated from the world for
41. 13:05 hundreds of years. And this shared fantasy have a longevity and sustainability. They hold they’re strong and they survive because of this independence from any external context. That’s why it’s very difficult to apply the criterion of normaly
42. 13:27 the criterion of health mental health is more applicable I think because even if you apply it to a society you ask the three questions. Are people in the society happy? First question, egoentony. Are they egoonous with the society? Do they feel comfortable? They
43. 13:44 feel good. They feel happy. They they have a optimistic. They have a vision for the future and so on. The second question is a society functional. Is society making money, rich, exporting, importing, creating infrastructure, educating, healthcare, you know, is
44. 13:59 society functional? And the third question which I propose is is the society detached from reality. If there is a society that is that subsists of fantasy it would set it could satisfy the first two but never the third. Then the question of course
45. 14:16 what defines reality and there you can introduce statistics whereas I think introducing statistics in in the field of mental health is wrong. Mhm. Because it always depends on the context and then there’s a question of framework and reframing and so on. I think
46. 14:36 introducing statistics when it comes to reality is right because reality is much more objective than what constitutes mental health or not. For example, if the climate changes, thousands, tens of th tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of scientists are
47. 14:55 telling you that the climate is changing. And you have a society that denies climate change. That definitely we could say is an abnormal society because they deny reality. We can agree on what is reality. It’s very difficult to agree on what is mentally healthy. But it’s very
48. 15:14 easy to agree on what is reality. So there I would that’s why I propose to introduce the reality testing criteria because it will suddenly disambiguate everything make everything clear you know. So if you have a shared fantasy and in the shared fantasy the narcissist
49. 15:31 tells you that you are the most intelligent person ever you may feel good with it. Your egoentus you may even function well under this premise but when it comes to reality testing we could make a poll. your 20 closest friends and all your family
50. 15:51 members. We could make a poll and ask them uh do you think she’s the most brilliant person to have ever lived? And 20 out of 20 would say no. That is the reality testing. Yes. That’s why the shared fantasy would be abnormal pathological. I think this is the key criterion. The
51. 16:11 reality testing, not egoony, not because sick people have egoonyy. Narcissists have egoonyy. Narcissists are egoist and not functionality because many people function even with extreme mental health disorders. Border lines function well. It’s not the key.
52. 16:31 Even even with a fragmented ego, we can use this term ego syony or ego destiny. Yeah, the word ego is misused and abused to the point of this beyond recognition. Ego in Freud’s work is essentially the seat of psychological functioning. The ego performs multiple psychological
53. 16:56 functions among them reality testing, right? Testing is an ego function. But when we say egoonyy, we actually not necessarily mean ego in the Freudian sense. We simply mean that you feel good with yourself. I think ego in egoony means self selfony.
54. 17:13 So it’s not exactly ego not clinical ego definitely. Okay.